Crabapple?

Here are the spent flowers on the tree Pat my neighbor tells me is a crabapple. There is a difference which I suppose to mean that some of these flowers are pregnant, some not so much. If I plant my grafted apples nearby, will they benefit from the pollen of this tree, a prolific flower producer, and will this tree benefit from cross pollination from the new trees? It's worth a try.

Building Blueberry Hill- progress to date

Blueberry Hill

The story of blueberry hill- so far I've completed about 10 feet, but the blueberries are planted, along with their friends.

March 19-the hill is frosted with the green of the first leaves of clover- six blueberry plants of three varieties crown the hill. Front edge is planted with onion sets, and there are pre-emergent snow peas planted behind.

The logs for the front edge, felled and left by the previous owner, were towed in by my garden tractor, with the help of this dolly I rigged up. This rig can go places the truck cannot go without getting stuck.

 

Assembling the planter over a place where water seeps out of the ground in winter. The seep is caused by the water table being raised by water falling on massive hills to the north.

The first step is collecting rotten wood from the forested part of the property. Here, Edgar, my helper/ protege, is transferring wood from the truck to the cart to transfer to the bed.

Here is the hugelkultur- inspired growbed with its 12+ inches of wood at its base. This wood, once broken down, will serve to soak up and store winter water and release it in the summer, plus add nutrition to the soil in years to come.

Once wood was stacked, the spaces were filled with sawdust to lessen settling.

After sawdust, a layer of plain topsoil was added, and a thin layer of manure to help supply nitrogen for further breaking down of the wood.

Finally a thick layer of special soil (pot grower's surplus) which has been highly amended.

Planting goes on with six blueberry plants that have been heeled in to temporary storage for months. Six plants of three varieties for redundancy in the required cross fertilization.

March 19 shows the heavy sowing of crimson clover is just coming up. The hill is mounded high- the clover will help to hold the soil until the mound settles and provide extra nitrogen.

On the edges I have planted onion sets. Maybe they will deter moles. Maybe not. You can see one precocious sprout among the emergent clover. Also there are snap peas planted heavily in back of the blueberries, but they haven't come up yet.

Further planting will proceed as the bed makes progress.  For the next section I have bought a half-dozen currant bushes of red, white, and black.  Maybe there will be a place for artichokes as well.

5/21 snapshot

I am working on some project-oriented posts to come a bit later, but here is a snapshot which may be a bit redundant.

I have been doing a lot of work on raised beds within the 16'x16' hoophouse frame.  I built six 12"x 2'x8' beds and filled them with 2/3 trucked-in topsoil and 1/3 manure-enhanced grass clipping compost. This amounted to 3 1/2 yards of topsoil (a black blend of sand and clay and commercial compost) and a little over a yard of composted grass. It seems like I've been shoveling and turning soil for a week, but really it has only been since Wednesday.  

Of course Tuesday I finished the beds and went to Katja's homestead on Gowdyville road for a sloppy truckload (2 yards) of "organic" cow manure (it had been raining) with the help of Edgar, who gives me 6 hours of his time once a week for my heavier projects, for pay.  My truck bed is a little higher than most, and it was with a certain pang of jealousy that I watched him hop up on the tailgate, when I have trouble getting in with two cinderblocks to step on and a stout hoe to steady myself. But he's a biddable, steady worker and his strength is welcome.

I've already bought some plants for the hoop house and elsewhere from various sites, including the Thursday farmer's market (4-7 pm) and the nursery north of Eugene for fruit trees.

hoop house- six tomatoes, three peppers, one tomatillo, 

half-shade hugel mound: six currants of white, red, and black, two globe artichokes, 

three elaeagnus (goumi) for the calico hedge project

climbing jasmine, citronella geranium, and of course two plums and two apples.

Plus that big ammo box full of landrace beans, corn, and squash from Carol Deppe.

I have been trying to get the forestry taken care of, but it's a lot.  There are enough trees having fallen by themselves so that I will not have to fell a tree for years, except one six inch oak that's shading the hoop house.  I'm letting it stand until I finish construction of the ends and cover- I like the shade.

Firewood Wednesdays have been suspended until I get some planting done.  I have bought most of the materials I need to extend the wood shed eight feet to contain our goal of six cords of wood by October. I also want to add a system to save our roof runoff in a large cistern, as well as some of the water that rushes down the hillside every winter.

I have staked out a larger garden plot (28x32x46x30) to contain the hoop house and some more, terraced with logs and surrounded with a deer fence. I may make the fence first, then move it when I tow in logs. That project requires also harvesting smaller logs for fenceposts from the selection of downed trees.

Mowing the meadows is supplying me with a steady influx of grass clippings to compost. I should have one happy garden by and by, as the hot compost ages and gets stockpiled against garden needs and aged longer and longer as it piles up.  I salted the meadow with lentils and clover to make more nitrogen, and I guess a mowing with mulch attachment now and then instead of collecting the clippings would be appropriate. But the bootstrap effect of all those clippings is welcome right now.

Well, tomorrow is another day, and perhaps one of rest.  But I should get to bed.

Easter week update plus Spring Fever recovery

Was it Spring Fever that got me the past 2 weeks, or just a flurry of social events?

I'll go with Spring Fever. Here's a photo I took on the lawn, loaded with tiny daisies, when I was between cleaning the gutters on a particularly warm day last week. You can tell it was warm- I'm down to two layers. Oh yeah, I really wanted that picture, so I lay down on the lawn even though it was squishing water through my shirt onto my back.

Catching up gets harder the longer I put it off.  These are some of my notes from April, and I will just publish them so that I can get to the present, mentioning some of these things as required later.  I will put a sentence on the topics and move on.

Buying firewood
We found that the wood we had been putting up was far too wet to use- I demonstrated this at one point by putting a load into our oven at 250F and observed a plume of steam coming out of the oven vent for six hours. We bought another cord of fir, and it is better than ours, but not as well seasoned as we might have wanted.

Stacking
MM is getting good at it, and is pretty much in charge of splitting wood and stacking in the wood shed.  Wednesdays we now designate "wood day" and as she works on that, I have been gathering downed wood and also planning a woodshed extension to allow for the six cords we think we need to have stacked for 3 cords this year and 3 the next, drying.

First Mowing and composting grass clippings
I spent two half-days mowing the  meadows for the first time, mowing and bagging most of the meadowlands and siloing it in 4 foot cylinders of wire cloth.  I filled three of these four foot diameter, four foot high cylinders, which over the intervening time have reduced to half.

Buying pallets
To provide good flooring stacking wood MM found a source of used pallets (some badly used) and I drove the Blue Bomb to Eugene to pick up a load of 24 for $70.

work on Blueberry hill
Work progresses- my #1 job these days

Hillside garden plan
after Blueberry Hill I want to develop the hill to the left of the sightline to the yurt.  I have flagged contours and  towed the extra logs there from Blueberry Hill to use in terracing there.

Mowing the back
Even though it was not really dry enough, I mowed the remaining meadow near the legacy fruit trees without catching grass.

Mystery tree may not have fruit.
The 20 foot tree which was a cloud of white blossoms is green with leaves coming out, and the blooms have dropped.  I cannot tell if any fruit has set. Neighbors cannot recall if fruit was ever found on the tree; though the 5-petaled flowers look like apple or pear blossoms.

All four legacy labeled fruit trees have bloomed or are blooming.  The Golden Delicious has one viable branch and the rest seems dead, so pruning required there. I hope to remove the cages and cardboard/ shade out the grass at their bases and replant with fruit tree guilds.

Purple iris 4/13
A few popped up here and there much to our surprise and pleasure.  Also revealing themselves are Oregon Grape, with yellow flowers, horsetail, white daisy in the meadows, the bushes out back might be Schip's Laurel.  A stand of stinging nettle has come up near the yurt.  Critters revealed: garter snake in the hot compost bin, tiny ants scouting the kitchen,


shooting
Some local boys were having a good old time in the M3 land for a couple weeks, but they have gone elsewhere lately.

Harvesting fence posts.
Lots out there to harvest- I did cull out a few- many more to go.  There is a shocking amount of down wood in the aftermath of winter that needs cleaning up.

Buying bare root plums and apples
Both two plums and two apples as bare root at a nursery North of Eugene where I went to get my soil tested.  They are heeled in to two tubs of pot grower's mix until I can find permanent places.

I have started planting sticks along the upper road in the blank spaces- alder is preferred, but I also have planted some maple and some mountain dogwood which appears to be very vigorous.  I am on the track to plant more alders, having identified a downed alder tree near the gnome village which has healthy looking leaves in spite of it all. I have planted miscellaneous sticks 3 feet apart with the intention to plant alders in between on the 18 inch marks

4/18: Today after an early morning dental appointment I planted planting cuttings from various local trees along a 25 foot stretch of our roadside- mountain dogwood, and another tree that I'm not sure of, but looked like it really had the will to live when I was gathering fencepost poles.  Good thing- I rammed an 18 inch hole in the wet clay and dropped the bare cutting in the hole, and closed it up. The ones I planted like this with Q, including a male alder,  both survived, so that was encouraging.  As she said at the time, if it dies, you've got a stick in the ground, but if it lives, you have a new tree. I planted them 3 fee apart, leaving room for alternating alders if I get some more cuttings.

After lunch it was time to move logs to finish the retaining wall for Blueberry Hill- really an 18" raised bed.  I made some progress, but it's not something you can do in a snap, logs being heavy by nature. I stack them two high, about 16-18 inches high, them bore 1/2" holes through both logs and pound a 1/2" rebar through both logs and 16 inches into the ground, for stability.  Log ends secured in this way, and I made sure to stagger the joints so that it ended up all connected.

 I added 4 or 5 today, two more to go, working with a chain and a-frame, 18 inch long spade bit, 8-pound hammer, t-bars, mostly standing in an inch or two of water from the morning rain. What's left to do after the retaining wall is built is to layer cardboard for the upper shallower portion, gather rotten wood for the bottom foot, get a truckload each of pine shavings and topsoil. Add pine shavings, manure, topsoil, (let settle and grade flat) and top off with that cannabis grower's formula special soil and plant the 6 blueberries.  Simple!  At least on paper. Earned generous praise from MM who knows about the care and feeding of her mate, (animal husbandry). Some of these tasks will be concurrent with getting the hoop house beds built and aging into readiness, which requires much the same treatment.

Monday April 24 I had a young man named Edgar help me for 6 hours. We focused on harvesting rotten logs for Blueberry Hill, managing to fill Big Blue's truck bed and getting it halfway up the driveway before reverse just quit.  Jim the mechanic is looking for a replacement transmission, but if it only costs us $1K we'll be lucky. So we're without drayage for now.

Tuesday April 25
Building more permanent compost bins: Used 5 pallets and some repurposed 1/2" hardware cloth from the storage cylinders to make a single-station compost bin, 40" x 40" x 48".  Quick calculation: 1 cu ft = 1728cu in.  That makes 44.44 cu ft = 1.6 cu yd.  compared with 1.86 yards in the cylinders I used before.

 I plan on two more bins side by side, to make a compost system, but I think I may need four. All the grass composting from two bins has settled down enough so that I could load it all into the one bin, heaped up to the max, with a shovel of manure every 6-8 inches of layering, and a generous hosing down each layer, So two collection bins become one composting bin over time. I had been surprised to find dry places in the bins, though the grass had been wet and I had watered some as I was adding it.  The compost had cooled from 160 to 150 over the last few days, and I reckoned that the pile needed turning, so a new bin, easier to turn and ventilated on six sides was needed. I'm hoping that turning twice may be enough, when juiced up with manure and guided by the thermometer; that will allow me to turn out a new batch of compost every month, in time with the mowing.

The next thing I need is a shoulder-hung brush trimmer for brush and cutting grass in the ditches where the mower can't go. I don't want to mess with a scythe until I have some leisure time to learn how to use it and strengthen my muscles. I'm looking at one at Homer's on hwy 99 for about $400.  Can be used with a multi-string trimmer or a triple blade.

Tomorrow is wood day again- and lots of rain predicted. We'll probably go down to the culvert where the creek crosses the road west of the house. The same area where Edgar and I were gathering rotten logs on Monday.  We will have to cut the logs into splittable stove wood lengths and transport it in the dump cart, because Old Blue is still waiting for a transmission. Clearing out sections of one rotten log we uncovered three animal leg traps within a 5 foot circle.  No telling how long they'd been there, under that rotting log.

Thursday I would like to throw together a couple more bins for grass clippings, or maybe one double sized one. Lowell is coming Friday it looks like, so I might not get as much done, though it is predicted to be the first day of at least 5 days with less than 0.1in of rain predicted and high temperatures climbing almost to 70 coupled with 10mph breezes in the afternoon, which may provide enough drying to mow and bag in the afternoons.

Sorry no pictures this post- I'll make it up with a photoessay on the hugel-ish raised bed at Blueberry Hill, with techniques, etc,  which is now on my mind.

An oak kicks my butt, and a flowering tree attracts many wild pollinators.

In which Hal and MM get consecutive license plates and almost consecutive driver's licenses; the sun comes out,  and the rain; Hal gets his butt kicked by some huge oak rounds, and the last alder log is sectioned and made into half-rounds for splitting, and Hal relocates the fast come-along.

The butt-kicking:
The oak sections have been waiting by the side of the road ever since that day last week when we decided that the dump cart wasn't strong enough to carry them.  I had made some preparations- ordering some log tongs and bolting a 2x12 across the front of the truck bed to use an an anchor point for a come-along to winch them onboard, or a rope and pulley.  I backed the truck down the creekside road to avoid having to turn around, and put down the 10 foot 2x12 ramp, and connected up the slow (÷2) come along. I started with the largest- I figured once I had that down everything else would be easy.

Except that the round kept pushing the end of the ramp up instead of sliding up, and the come along was excruciatingly slow.  The rope pulley was easy to rig but I couldn't budge the log. Eventually I used the come along together with a 5/8 manila rope rigged into a taut-line hitch, which allowed me to take a bight out of the rope when the come along had drawn its full 4-foot range.  (I had looked and looked again to find the 1x come along, but with no success.) The 2x come along configuration was too slow and dead easy to pull; I have two come alongs, so as not to have to keep reconfiguring and possibly losing parts.  In the end I did get the round about 1/3 of the way up the ramp, but then it slid off to the side repeatedly.

In the end I gave it a rest.  Lessons learned: sloppy thinking did not pay off.  Need some way to keep the log on track while being pulled up the ramp.  The ramp needs a stop added to prevent sliding into the truck when an object is being pulled.  I'm considering an a-frame arrangement anchored and pivoting just behind the wheel wells to lift the round without a ramp.  I'm thinking that a piece of steel angle across the bottom side of the ramp where it passes over the tailgate would prevent sliding.  And I'm thinking that I'd be better off bringing chainsaw, sledge, maul and wedge to the road and cutting up the rounds into manageable pieces to load on the truck.

Getting some splitting done:
Fueled by frustration I sawed up the last remaining log at the woodshed- 14" diameter by six feet long, which I cut into 5 lengths and split in halves for the power splitter later on.  Then I loaded the chainsaw, oil, gas, wedge, maul, and sledge hammer into the garden cart for my next expedition to get the oak rounds at the creek overpass.

Consecutive license plates:
But before all this happened, we had our morning excursion.  In order to register our cars we had to have pink slips from California DMV, and that detail somehow slipped our notice when we made our final car payments; getting the paperwork straightened out was MM's doing and finally the day arrived last week when the titles arrived in the mail.  Today we made time in the morning t go down to the DMV and register our cars and get Oregon driver's licenses.  We got through the DMV with a minimum of fuss, taking written tests and presenting our ID, getting our VINs verified, etc.  When the smoke cleared we had driver's licenses one number apart and consecutive license plates.  Something not many couples can say.  So that was today's treat.

But wait! another treat:

There used to be a bee hive right in the driveway, in a hollow oak: the seller had it removed, presumably because it was dying. As it happened they were taking down the tree on the day we first came to view the property. That oak tree is the same whose wood was giving me fits where they dumped it by the bank of the creek. Some of the hollow pieces still had honeycomb inside. So the area lost the services of the bee hive that day. This afternoon, the decorative front yard apple tree, jammed with flowers and blazing in the sunlight, was loaded with all kinds of pollinators like hover flies, visiting the flowers, but not domestic bees.  Showing that there is resiliency in nature.  I was happy to be giving these unsung creatures a feast for once. And when the sun had been shining directly on the flowers  few minutes, the blooms began to give off their perfume, sweet and evocative.

Post Script: After I didn't need it, I found the 1x come along stashed behind the seat in Big Blue, in case of need. When this happens, I usually leave it there rather than move it, so that I don't have to find it again.

Wednesday Wood Day

Wednesday 3-25

Rain and wind early- our hopes of seeing it dry out enough to get the ruts under control must wait awhile.

The log tongs should have come yesterday, so I checked the tracking from Amazon. It said they were delivered to our mailbox yesterday late afternoon.  Logging tongs fit in our mailbox? It proved to be true: that was some big mailbox I installed.

MM with 1/3 cord.  You can see the tongs over her left shoulder.

Today was a woodshed day- sawing, splitting, and stacking firewood. MM and I split and stacked the rounds we had gathered in the last week and put the new log tongs to work. We have been pencilling out our usage so far (1 1/2 cords) and calculating how much we need by winter. Looks like we need 3-4 cords for the winter months.  And ideally we need to age the wood for two years before burning, so we need to have double that so that it will be aged properly.  Our woodshed may hold 4 cords, so we need to increase storage  too.  After today’s stacking, we have a half cord split. 

1/6 cord stack we're working on now

We learned to cross-stack the ends for better stability.

Good news is, there’s a lot of wood on our property waiting to be gathered.  That does not include living trees, but it does include trees that have fallen due to ice storms, overgrowing their habitat, or having been cut and left on the ground last year- we don't why they were cut and limbed but not harvested, but hey.  We need to stockpile these trees before they rot. And our neighbor Jon has given us a huge douglas fir tree that was felled last year and is lying in a ditch, already cut into rounds for splitting.  I came close to hurting myself trying to load the larger rounds, but now I have rigged up a ramp and attachment point to winch it into the truck, and I have new log tongs to make it easier.

Two rough cut oak slabs with matched faces. 

All this makes the buzz about rocket mass heaters seem pretty interesting.  Claims are these wood powered heaters can reduce fuel use to a fraction of what is needed for other devices.

While we were splitting some oak we salvaged we noticed some interesting grain.  I cut a couple of matched slabs and also some other pieces with the chain saw and I hope to make some one-of-a-kind end tables or something out of it. There is beauty everywhere, if we have eyes to see it.

We quit when we started to stumble around from exhaustion, just about 5; so it worked out well.  I made dinner then, and in its aftermath we are sitting around half-dazed, looking forward to bed time.

Monday and Tuesday Diaries

Monday, March 27, 2017

Loaded 2 cartloads of med bark and spread out in hoop house.

Pressure washed the truck

Rigged awning for work in the rain outside garage door.

Made attachment point for come-along at front of the truck bed. 

Rigged rope pulley and 10’ 2x12 ramp- ready to load large rounds when log tongs get here.

(2^nd 2x12 read to pair for tractor ramp.)

Installed heavy duty screweye off the eave in the center of the garage door,

for loading/ unloading heavy objects onto the truck bed.

Only this flower is open- one of thousands on the tree.

Made upside-down cake in the morning.

Took ¼ cake to Jon just to share.

Tuesday 3/28

Late start- breakfast casserole 10am

Made adaptor plate for guest bathroom light fixture

Split larger rounds by cutting cross in top and inserting wedge or maul, drive w sledge hammer

Trimmed low branches on fir near woodshed below 5 feet, leaving stubs for climbing.

 Trying to find an efficient way to bundle 1/2-2" branches.

Need a way to make and bind tighter bundle- maybe ¼” rope and Spanish windlass- finish with several wraps of twine?

First open flower on mystery fruit tree- bud break!